Diagnostic analyzers are used to conduct testing on blood samples to determine a characteristic, trait, property, or condition of the blood samples. Diagnostic analyzers often utilize moving circular carousels which hold reaction vessels into which blood samples and reagents are added. In order to pre-treat the blood samples needing incubation time prior to diagnostically testing these blood samples, the circular carousels typically rotate around multiple times while the blood samples within the circular carousels are incubating. This increases the time duration of completing the analysis because the diagnostic analyzer has to wait until the circular carousels finish the pre-treatment cycles before diagnostically testing the pre-treated blood samples. Alternatively, a segment of a circular carousel may be used for a pretreatment incubation then transferred back to the first incubation entry point to continue processing. This decreases throughput because new blood samples are delayed to allow pretreatment samples in process to continue. Moreover, use of the circular carousels requires a great deal of space, and requires that spots on the circular carousels be reserved for pre-treatment.
A diagnostic analyzer and method of testing a blood sample is needed to overcome one or more of the issues of one or more of the existing diagnostic analyzers.